New Arista COO Todd Nightingale: ‘I’m Excited To Get Back To Networking’

‘I am a networking person. Getting to build the infrastructure that the internet depends on is, to me, an honor and a gift, and I did miss it. It’s just an exciting opportunity to be able to get back to the technology that I love,’ Arista Networks’ new president and COO, Todd Nightingale, tells CRN.

Todd Nightingale, a self-proclaimed “networking person,” couldn’t be more excited about his new role as president and chief operating officer of Arista Networks and getting back into the networking game.

Nightingale joined Santa Clara, Calif.-based Arista on July 1 from edge cloud company Fastly Inc., where he served as the company’s CEO for three years. Prior to that, the seasoned networking specialist spent 10 years climbing the ranks within Cisco after joining the company through its Meraki acquisition in 2012. Before his time at Fastly, he served as executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s multibillion-dollar Enterprise Networking and Cloud business.

Now back in the networking arena, Nightingale is jumping in with both feet to build on the momentum that Arista has spent years cultivating to take the company to the next level. Arista stands out in the market thanks to the experience it has building some of the largest, most sophisticated networks in the world, he told CRN. But that doesn’t mean the company is limited to working with cloud giants and the largest of the large enterprises. In fact, Nightingale believes that the compelling vision Arista has for AI-powered networking, and the performance and reliability it promises, is applicable to all businesses.

Nightingale sat down with CRN during his first week on the job to talk about why now was the time to come back to networking, macroeconomic and M&A activity affecting the market, and how he plans to double down with partners to put Arista’s products and services into the hands of more customers.

Here’s what Nightingale had to say.

Tell us about your new role and why now was the time to make the jump to Arista Networks?

I’m just excited to get back to networking. I am a networking person. That’s what I’ve done basically my whole professional life, and I love it. Getting to build the infrastructure that the internet depends on is, to me, an honor and a gift, and I did miss it. It’s just an exciting opportunity to be able to get back to the technology that I love and I’ve been working on my whole career, all the way back to grad school. It’s an interesting time in the market right now. I think specifically, Arista has built so much momentum and has so much success with the largest, most sophisticated networks in the world. This vision of bringing the promise of Arista performance and reliability at the highest possible level to the whole market, it’s incredibly compelling to me. To hear Jayshree [Ullal, Arista’s founder and CEO] talk about it, it’s an amazing vision. And it was impossible to pass up.

This is an organization that’s passionate about the technology in the market and all of those things, but deeply customer focused, deeply passionate about the customer experience and delivering because of that, I think, really the highest quality networking equipment in the world. That matters more today than it ever has. I could not be more excited about it.

How will you leverage your extensive networking experience in your new position as COO?

I think, one, is trying to bring a focus on the enterprise customer base. Arista has had so much so much success in the [high-performance computing] and the hyperscaler space and in the largest of enterprises in finance and healthcare, et cetera, and being able to make sure that Arista technology and that level of performance and level of quality is available to [and] can be reached by every single customer. To me, that is a big part of the experience that I bring. A big part of that comes from channel engagements. Obviously, that’s where I come from, and it’s sort of near and dear to my heart. The bringing of not just all of the services and the technology to the end customer, but bringing the right offering to the partner community that matters, that allows them to build technology, practices, expertise, systems integration services, managed service offerings that matter to customers. It’s a win, win. It makes it that much easier for customers to access Arista technology and really deliver best in class networking. It allows, I think, partners to thrive and build successful practices around Arista, which is good for the market, it’s good for the customer.

Every single meeting I’ve had with the enterprise sales team has focused on the channel and channel engagement. Every single one. It’s top of mind for every single one of the members of our team because it helps us reach more customers.

Arista acquired VeloCloud earlier this month. Are there any other gaps in the portfolio you’re looking to fill?

Never say never, but I think the VeloCloud acquisition is so strategic because of exactly that. It fills a gap in our portfolio, and in a lot of ways, it’s the last strategic gap. It allows Arista to bring the performance and reliability that people know us for, across the entire integration, from the high-performance computing and AI clouds, to the enterprise data center, and now with SD-WAN and switching and wireless, a full campus solution as well. That’s pretty much end-to-end networking, and in a lot of ways, it completes the portfolio, especially for the enterprise, which is awesome.

How do you see Arista being impacted by the recently closed HPE-Juniper Networks acquisition?

It’ll be interesting to see how the HPE, Aruba and Juniper Mist stuff shake outs, but people turn to Arista when they’re looking for the most reliable networking equipment in the world, and for us, that is going to be core to our promise, whether It’s AI cloud, high performance data center solutions, university campus, or retail branch or hospitality sites, healthcare, et cetera. For us, that grand promise of the most reliable and highest performing network in the world that is going to be who we are, top to bottom, and by completing the portfolio and really giving people the opportunity to deploy an Arista network end to end, I think we will just find ourselves able to reach so many more customers. I think that’s why our focus has shifted so much to the channel right now, because reaching more customers is our focus. [The channel] is the only way to do it.

Are you seeing cloud repatriation breathing new life into the data center opportunity?

We’ve been talking about that for a long time! In the enterprise, for sure, we see it. I think where we are with global politics, etc., people are looking towards more cloud sovereignty; people are looking to be able to control in a more fine-grained way where their data is held. I think it’s good for the internet that people are paying more attention to that. I think it makes that data center solution that much more important. We hear it. I hear about it in finance, I hear about in healthcare, and I hear about it from governments across around the world. I don’t think it’s going away.

I think people are waiting for one day for [the pendulum-swinging] to end, and I don’t think we’re ever going to see that. There’s always going to be an optimal architecture for the requirements that our customers have, and I think those requirements change, and that’s why the design practices, architecture practices within the partner community are so important because we’re not going to come to a final architecture. We’re going to be building to the needs of the customer forever. Cloud repatriation is certainly real and we see it every day.

What’s the biggest opportunity you see right now for Arista and its partners?

For us, the biggest opportunity here is really new customer acquisition for the Arista architecture. We’ve had enormous success driving this enormous momentum in the largest accounts in the world -- the people who have the most sophisticated networks in the world. But everyone needs that reliability. Everyone needs that performance. There’s no reason why smaller healthcare firms don’t need the sophistication that the largest have; why the smaller financial institutions don’t need the sophistication the largest have. Around the world, the fact that the Internet has become 100 percent of how we do business, how we operate our lives, how we engage in delivering the mission of our organizations, the reliability that Arista delivers to the largest hyperscalers in the world is needed by everyone. So, I think the biggest opportunity for us is to make that technology available to every single customer around the world. Specifically, I think there’s a real opportunity internationally as well. We have an opportunity, I think, to lead through channel engagement in countries around the world. I’m excited about that.

[In] joining an organization like Arista that has so much success and momentum, the first thing [for me] has to be to do no harm and to make sure that before we think about changing anything, we’re thinking about adding fuel to the fire and building on momentum we already have. And to do that, it comes down to understanding the organization. What that means to me is first and foremost is customer engagement. My calendar is filling up with customer and partner calls. For me, the first step of that is engaging with the customers and the partners directly and ensuring that the value and what they depend on Arista for, that we are holding on to every 100 percent every ounce of that. The second one is to figure out how to add fuel to that flame and where we have to adjust, and that comes from meeting the teams and driving through the organization and the process that we run. And to be honest, it’s just maybe this is a little unique to where we are right now, there’s an amazing opportunity in the campus. We have phenomenal wireless and switching portfolio in place right now that I think isn’t getting enough attention, enough eyeballs from the market, and with the [Velocloud] acquisition, [it’s] a real complete campus solution that I think is going to be formidable in the market for years.